When it was built, in 1923, it was consid - ered the first tennis stadium in America. For much of the 20th century Forest Hills was the mecca of the Western tennis world. The U.S. National Championships and its succes- sor the U.S. Open was played there sixty-one times. It’s where Althea Gibson broke the tennis color barrier in 1950 (and won in ’57 and ’58), where Rod Laver capped his Grand Slam in 1969, where Manuel Orantes up- set first Guillermo Vilas then cocky Jimmy Connors in the still-marveled-at ’75 Open. Ashe, Borg, Budge, Court, Evert, Gonzalez, Goolagong, King, McEnroe, Navratilova— they all played there too. More recently, the stadium became home to a colony of feral cats. It was basically a concrete ruin in the backyard of a tennis club. That club, the West Side Tennis Club, hosted the Open and owns the stadium. Tennis clubs are viewed as playgrounds for the well-heeled and are, by extension, well- heeled themselves. Not the West Side Tennis Club. You get the impression it’s been in gen- tle decline ever since the tournament pulled out in ’78 for nearby Flushing Meadows. The members are endearingly honest about this. You visit them in their sprawling Tudor-style clubhouse and they’re like, “We wanted to create a museum here to display our history but we don’t have the money. Hey, do you or your wife play tennis? We have a deal for ju- nior members under 34.” It would be a burden for any club to maintain a near-century-old steel-and-con- crete Romanesque stadium that hasn’t been used for a significant tennis event since the Tournament of Champions in the ’80s. It languished. Three times the club members took a vote to sell it to developers. In 2011, in a last-ditch salvation effort, someone pro- posed the stadium for landmark status, but the Landmarks Preservation Committee, noting the crumbling facade and extensive
water damage, rendered it “ineligible at this time.” Then something remarkable happened for New York. The real estate buzzards who’d been eyeing the place were chased away. Too many club members felt the stadium was too much a part of their history and agreed to save it (or rather, they never reached the supermajority vote needed to sell). That left them searching for a savior to bring it back to life as you might an ancient amphitheater. Strangely, that savior was a rock promoter. There’s a parallel history of Forest Hills as a music venue, it turns out, as rich in some ways as the tennis stuff. Name just about any important artist from the ’60s and early ’70s, and they played Forest Hills. And yet it doesn’t make anyone’s list of famous venues, even if the list is kept to New York. When I asked Craig Finn, the lead singer of the Brooklyn-based Hold Steady and a student of rock culture, why that was, he chalked it up to a lack of continuity. “A lot of the plac - es that are famous are continual,” Finn said. “Linda Ronstadt played the Troubadour, but so did Nirvana. There’s a gap in the Forest Hills story.” As Roland Meier, the president until re - cently of the West Side Tennis Club, put it to me, “Two generations don’t know about Forest Hills.” The last truly great concert to take place at Forest Hills was probably the Talking Heads, in ’83. But let’s start where so much of rock history does, with the Beatles. The Shea Stadium shows in ’65 get all the attention and have since become lodged in the city’s collec - tive imagination, but the band performed at Forest Hills a full year before that, on Aug. 28 and 29, 1964. This was just months after the Ed Sulli - van appearance, at the frenzied, pants-wet-
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